Comment Re:Good sales push (Score 0) 282
Good idea. Ringing up the police each time is a bad idea - they'd be inundated.
Comment NGP (Score 0) 47
Saw this coming the day I first set eyes on it.
Slide-out design is awful. The NGP looks great - hopefully they will allow you to clone the ps3 video-out wirelessly to play games in close proximity to the console. My guess is this is what nintendo have up their sleeve for the wii2.
Comment Re:Them swedes. (Score 0) 420
How do I mod you up? I've been using slashdot for a while but I don't understand the moderation system at all :(
Comment Contaminating the environment of our descendants (Score 0) 1148
No surprises here. Japan won't be a Chernobyl but hopefully it serves as a little reminder that by creating radioactive waste we are leaving a nightmare legacy to future generations.
How will they clean the air and the toxic rivers? Anyone?
Magical fairy dust methinks. Stop wasting money on nuclear energy and invest in renewables. Nuclear is short term gain only which is why you hear so much about it from capitalist profit seekers (who don't see the big picture, just their next paycheck).
Comment Re:Slow news day?? (Score 0) 947
I know that. The problem is, most childrens teachers don't.
As you say, some of this falls into the theology territory (how are we here) and this needs to be acknowledged by those who want evolution taught at school. Religious classes are important here.
So much scientific doctrine is just as faith based as the major religions. There are factions which argue over tiny but significant details and there are plot holes everywhere.
What I'd love to see is an encyclopedia from 2500. What will the beliefs about the universe and the nature of our reality be then?
Comment Re:Slow news day?? (Score 1) 947
We have proof that women can be as smart as men.
The complete history of human biological development however is tricky and incomplete.
This stuff gets simplified in children's classrooms to the point that it becomes black and white.
This is a minefield and there is so much more developed material out there that we should be focused on dishing out. Teaching stuff you dont understand is a terrible mistake.
I've had a couple of teachers over the years try to answer tough questions in various subjects and what happens is the student comes away with the wrong information.
When I think about the crap that was taught in my physics class and how it was explained or how mathematics was applied I shudder to imagine a children's teacher explaining the intricacies of evolution without saying stupid crap like we used to be monkeys / there is no God.
There's so much more to it and it's delicate stuff.
Kids should be doing more practical stuff in my opinion. More experiments, chemistry combos, assembling engines, building lego robots, programming, practicing formulas and doing webvideos with different language countries.
Domestic Use of Aerial Drones By Law Enforcement 299
PatPending writes "Aerial drones are now used by the Texas Department of Public Safety; the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, Colorado; the Miami-Dade County, Florida, Police Department; and the Department of Homeland Security. But what about privacy concerns? 'Drones raise the prospect of much more pervasive surveillance,' said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. 'We are not against them, absolutely. They can be a valuable tool in certain kinds of operations. But what we don't want to see is their pervasive use to watch over the American people.'"
Comment Re:High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity (Score 0) 165
Fascinating thanks.
We all need to be thinking about redesigning the future. Perhaps some sci-fi student video will inspire us. We need a new cultural vision.
Artificial Retinas Can Balance a Pencil On Its End 165
mikejuk writes "A team of researchers has built a neural information system that is good enough and fast enough to balance a pencil in real time. If you think it's an easy task, try it! The Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH / University Zurich have used what look like video cameras to do the job but in fact they are analog silicon retinas. They work so fast that even with fairly basic hardware they can balance a pencil."
60% of AOL's Profits Come From Misinformed Customers 301
satuon writes "Ken Auletta's big New Yorker piece on AOL (subscription only) this week revealed an interesting detail about the company's inner workings. According to Auletta, 80% of AOL's profits come from subscribers, and 75% of those subscribers are paying for something they don't actually need. According to Auletta: "The company still gets eighty percent of its profits from subscribers, many of whom are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. 'The dirty little secret,' a former AOL executive says, 'is that seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it.'"
IRS Nails CPA For Copying Steve Jobs, Google Execs 509
theodp writes "It seems $1 salaries are only for super-wealthy tech execs. The WSJ reports that CPA David Watson incurred the wrath of the IRS by only paying himself $24,000 a year and declaring the rest of his take profit. It's a common tax-cutting maneuver that most computer consultants working through an S Corporation have probably considered. Unlike profit distributions, all salary is subject to a 2.9% Medicare tax and the first $106,800 is subject to a 12.4% Social Security tax (FICA). By reducing his salary, Watson didn't save any income taxes on the $379k in profit distributions he received in 2002 and 2003, but he did save nearly $20,000 in payroll taxes for the two years, the IRS argued, pegging Watson's true pay at $91,044 for each year. Judge Robert W. Pratt agreed that Watson's salary was too low, ruling that the CPA owed the extra tax plus interest and penalties. So why, you ask, don't members of the much-ballyhooed $1 Executive club like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt get in hot water for their low-ball salaries? After all, how inequitable would it be if billionaires working full-time didn't have to kick in more than 15 cents into the Medicare and Social Security kitty? Sorry kids, the rich are different, and the New Global Elite have much better tax advisors than you!"
Police Can Search Cell Phones Without Warrants 438
Hugh Pickens writes "The California Supreme Court has ruled 5 to 2 to allow police to search arrestees' cell phones without a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they're carrying when taken into custody. Under US Supreme Court precedents, 'this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee's body... but also to open and examine what they find,' the state court said. The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn't be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data and that the decision allows police 'to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee's person.' Interestingly enough, the Ohio Supreme Court reached an opposite conclusion in a December 2009 ruling that police had violated drug defendants' rights by searching their cell phones after their arrests. The Ohio-California split could prompt the US Supreme Court to take up the issue, says California Deputy Attorney General Victoria Wilson, who represented the prosecution in the case."
A Nude Awakening — the TSA and Privacy 728
DIplomatic writes "The Oklahoma Daily has a well-written editorial about the current state of airport security. Though the subject has overly-commented on, this article is well worth the read. Quoting: 'The risk of a terrorist attack is so infinitesimal and its impact so relatively insignificant that it doesn't make rational sense to accept the suspension of liberty for the sake of avoiding a statistical anomaly. There's no purpose in security if it debases the very life it intends to protect, yet the forced choice one has to make between privacy and travel does just that. If you want to travel, you have a choice between low-tech fondling or high-tech pornography; the choice, therefore, to relegate your fundamental rights in exchange for a plane ticket. Not only does this paradigm presume that one's right to privacy is variable contingent on the government's discretion and only respected in places that the government doesn't care to look — but it also ignores that the fundamental right to travel has consistently been upheld by the Supreme Court. If we have both the right to privacy and the right to travel, then TSA's newest procedures cannot conceivably be considered legal. The TSA's regulations blatantly compromise the former at the expense of the latter, and as time goes on we will soon forget what it meant to have those rights.'"
Carbon Dioxide Emissions Fall Worldwide In 2009 221
Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that the good news is that emissions from burning coal, oil, and natural gas fell 1.3 percent compared with emissions in 2008 primarily because of the global economic downturn and an increase in carbon-dioxide uptake by the oceans and by plants on land. One big factor was La Niña, a natural seesaw shift in climate that takes place across the tropical Pacific every three to seven years, where the climate is cooler and wetter over large regions of land in the tropics, encouraging plant growth in tropical forests. However the bad news is that even with the decrease in emissions the overall concentration of CO2 rose from 385 ppm in 2008 to 387 ppm in 2009, as concentrations continue to rise even as emissions slip because even at the reduced pace, humans are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can scrub the gas. Many countries have agreed in principle to try to stabilize emissions at 350 ppm by century's end, which would result in a 50 percent chance of holding the increase in global average temperatures to about 2 degrees C over pre-industrial levels."
Debt Collectors Using Facebook To Embarrass Those Who Owe 266
Not even the tranquility of FarmVille can save you from the long arm of debt collectors. Melanie Beacham says that a collector from MarkOne Financial contacted her relatives about her past due car note via Facebook. She is filing suit alleging that the company is harassing her family. Tampa based consumer attorney Billy Howard of Morgan & Morgan says, "Now Facebook does a debt collectors work for them. Now it's not only family members, it's all of your associates. It's a very powerful tool for debt collectors to use."
